Now it's onto the card itself. Highpoint has used the half height size limit to the extreme by extending the card longer than the PCI slot itself. This is how they are able to keep the card small in height to fit the server environment. On the front of the card are the controller chips, Peizo buzzer speaker, HDD activity and Error LED ports, four SATA II 3Gb/s data ports capable of RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD / Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and the HP link port.

All of the card real estate is used to get the controller chips onboard. The back of the card hosts the IC chips as well as the Highpoint hot swap 601 controller chip to allow the drives to hot swap without any interference to the operating system.

Lastly we have what drives the Highpoint 1740 controller. In the past, Highpoint has made its own controller chips, but we haven't actually seen any Highpoint branded chips since the IDE days, and all of the early SATA controllers with Highpoint controller chips were IDE to SATA bridges. This is true again; Highpoint has turned to Marvell for its PCI based 88SX6042 controller chip. This chip supports all of the features of the SATA 2.5 specs but runs them through the PCI bus rather than PCI Express or PCI-X.